AIIM report on Enterprise 2.0

The headline from IT World Canada reads: Enterprise 2.0 report: IT managers take back seat. Read the article to get their take on the report from AIIM – but in a nutshell it talks about the fact that IT managers are most likely to be number 3 in leading their organization in web 2.0 or enterprise 2.0.

I’m not surprised! Why should they be the leaders in Enterprise 2.0? Other than the fact that it uses some technology to function, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 really have nothing to do with the IT department. The IT World Canada author (Shane Schick) did a good thing when he included the quote from OpenText’s Bill Forquer, executive vice-president of marketing,…..

“We’ve seen that with records management over the last number of years. Something like Enron happens and the awareness of records management and policies is suddenly a boardroom-level conversation,” he said. “Part of the business and IT groups that are focused on work-group effectiveness and collaboration could actually benefit from 2.0 technologies and capabilities.”

Records management has it’s own set of experts so why should IT management have anything to do with RM other than providing support for the technology. The same thing happened with web services.

Many years ago when the world wide web first appeared to average computer users, there was lots of denial by IT departments to support it. Eventually the web made it’s way into the enterprise and web services ended up in other departments or divisions such as marketing. There are stories galore of where IT managers did everything from ignoring it to aggressively stand in the way of web being adopted by the organization. Needless to say they were run over and in some cases may even appear to embrace it.

I see the history of web repeating itself with Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. We are at the point where some get it, most don’t but eventually the enterprise will make it a part of their daily operation and we will grind to a halt when it stops working or they try to take it away from us.